Many of the ideas have been/will be applied to other systems, and that will affects end users as well. It's just that there's no need to use the same system for doing research and for, say, browsing the web.
Having said that, but for web browsing, I'm quite happy using Plan 9 as an end user that mostly writes code, slides, and docs and reads mail. I mean, I use it not just to modify it. This does not mean I cannot use others as well.
